Recently, a close friend sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Things I’ve Noticed As I Get Older.” The ten numbered observations ranged from the mundane (politics is getting stupider) to the poignant (the distant melancholy of Facebook’s News Feed, with its dispatches from lives that were once, and now no longer, close to one’s own). But with all due respect to the observational chops of my correspondent, it wasn’t so much the content of the message that impressed me as its form. It was an e-mail in the shape of a listicle, a personal correspondence structured for the purposes of frictionless social-media sharing. At some level, it seemed, my friend intended his e-mail to go viral within the highly targeted demographic of me. I couldn’t help feeling that some basic epistolary protocol had been breached, that I was seeing an early sign of what could be a shift in the way people communicate. In the not too distant future, all human interactions, written or otherwise, might well be conducted in the form of lists—for ease of assimilation, for catchiness, for optimal snap. I imagined myself, some decades from now, nervously perched on the papered leatherette of an examination bed, and my doctor directing her sad, humane eyes at me a moment before clearing her throat and saying, “Top Five Signs You Probably Have Pancreatic Cancer.”
I’ll admit that the above is a little on the fatalistic side, but we all recognize that the list is the signature form of our time. (“37 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Pit Bulls.” “15 More Bizarre Kiddie Cartoon Conspiracy Theories.” “The 12 Meanest Ways to Tip a Waiter.” “22 Pictures of Miley Cyrus’ Open Mouth.”) The stream of content that rushes through our lives often seems like an absurdist spectacle of randomly generated specifics, a comic nightmare of futile enumeration. The point of counting is, in a way, to get to the end of counting; but this is a counting that admits of no conclusion—a bottomless inventory of everything and nothing. (“8 of the Most Inappropriate Moments from Last Night’s VMAs.” “13 Signs You’re Addicted to Lip Balm.” “7 Disney Cartoons You Should Definitely Go Back To.” “6 Animals With Sex Lives That Are Weirdly Human.”)
Last month, as an exercise in outside-the-box advertising in conjunction with their corporate sponsor Pepsi Next, BuzzFeed launched something called the ListiClock, a Web page that displays a flip clock with a BuzzFeed listicle for every hour, minute, and second of the day. As of this writing, for instance, the time is precisely 2:27:47 P.M., and this fleeting moment is illustrated by the following listicles: “2 Messages from the Romney Campaign,” “27 Toys You Threw Out That Are Worth a Fortune Now,” and “47 Superb Owls.” (I clicked on the owls, fearing that I would never again have a chance to see them; they were, to be fair, uniformly superb.)
The seconds flip by with such remorseless speed that it’s almost impossible to read the title of one listicle before it’s replaced by another. The result is an endless succession of half-glimpsed enticements: “18 Things You Probably Didn’t …,” “11 Reminders That …,” “29 Most Interesting …,” “20 Breathtaking Photos of … .” If you watch any clock for long enough, especially one that displays the seconds as they pass, a particular kind of despair sets in. Here, now, is a time that will never be again; and now—this exact moment—is already gone; and you are now one second closer to death, etc. The ListiClock, with its unceasing enumeration of enumerations, heightens this anxiety. It not only becomes an intense reminder of the ongoing depletion of our store of moments but also points to a means of depleting them that is, arguably, among the most fruitless of all: diversion unto death. This is probably not the kind of brand extension that Pepsi Next had in mind with their sponsorship of the ListiClock.
In an interview with The Paris Review twenty years ago, Don DeLillo mentioned that “lists are a form of cultural hysteria.” From the vantage point of today, you wonder how much anyone—even someone as routinely prescient as DeLillo—could possibly have identified list-based hysteria in 1993. DeLillo’s statement also hints at something crucial about the list as a form: the tension between its gesturing toward order and its acknowledgement of order’s impossibility. The list—or, more specifically, the listicle—extends a promise of the definitive while necessarily revealing that no such promise could ever be fulfilled. It arises out of a desire to impose order on a life, a culture, a society, a difficult matter, a vast and teeming panorama of cat adorability and nineties nostalgia. Umberto Eco put it dramatically: “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order.”
But even the most definitive-seeming inventories are always undermined by a sense of their own arbitrariness. There’s an absurdity—a hysteria—that lurks between the lines of the most stern and sober of lists. Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments (or “10 Judeo-Christian Moral Injunctions You Need in Your Life Right Now”) was surely aware that it could just as well have been eight, or eleven, or seventy-seven commandments. (You get the sense that God, or whoever, could have gone on prohibiting and decreeing things all day, but that He was well aware of His people’s already compromised powers of attention.)
The rise of the listicle obviously connects with the Internet’s much-discussed effect on our ability (or desire) to sit still and concentrate on one thing for longer than ninety seconds. Contemporary media culture prioritizes the smart take, the sound bite, the takeaway—and the list is the takeaway in its most convenient form. But even when the list, or the listicle, has nothing really to do with useful information, it still exerts an occult force on our attention—or on my attention, at any rate. (“34 Things That Will Make ’90s Girls Feel Old.” “19 Facts Only a Greek in the U.K. Can Understand.” “21 Kinds of Offal, Ranked By How Gross They Look.”) Like many of you, I am more inclined to click on links to articles that don’t reflect my interests if they happen to be in the form of countdowns. And I suspect my sheep-like behavior has something to do with the passive construction of that last sentence. The list is an oddly submissive reading experience. You are, initially, sucked in by the promise of a neatly quantified serving of information or diversion. There will be precisely ten (or fourteen, or thirty-three) items in this text, and they will pertain to precisely this stated topic. You know exactly what you’re going to get with a listicle. But there’s also a narrower sense in which you don’t know what you’re going to get at all. You know you’re going to get twenty-one kinds of gross offal, yes, but you don’t know which kinds of offal or how gross they’re going to be. Once you’ve begun reading, a strange magnetism of the pointless asserts itself.
The list gives a structure—a numerical narrative—to a text that would otherwise lack any kind of internal architecture. If you wanted to write something about, say, the phrases people use on Twitter that you find highly irritating, you can get away with not making any kind of over-all, analytical point by imposing the framework of a list. The enumeration itself, the getting to the end of the counting, becomes the point of the writing (and the reading). It’s not simply a jumbled heap of complaints about how people talk on Twitter; it’s a list, and in this sense it means business. It’s “10 Phrases People Need to Stop Using on Twitter,” with all the interventionist urgency and narrative propulsion that implies. As a reader, you’re probably going to click on it and read it, out of the expectation that some of your own most-hated phrases have been included therein, or out of the desire to experience some harmless outrage that they haven’t. (“Jesus, I can’t believe they left out ‘BREAKING: …’”)
In an essay about Internet addiction in The Dublin Review last year, the Irish novelist and short-story writer Kevin Barry wrote about how the rapid depletion of his powers of attention affected the way he composes a piece of writing: “Lately, I note, most of the essays and stories I write tend to be broken up into very short, numbered sections, because I can no longer replicate on the page the impression or sensation of consecutive, concentrated thought, because I don’t really do that anymore.” Of course, essayists have been using the list as a way to structure thought for a long time. (Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp,’” to point to a famous example, takes the form of a list of fifty-eight numbered fragments.) But the list is a way of writing that anticipates, and addresses itself to, a certain capriciousness in the reader. By not only allowing partial and fleeting engagement but by actively encouraging it, the list becomes the form which accommodates itself most smoothly to the way a lot of us read now, a lot of the time. It’s the house style of a distracted culture.
Not long after my friend sent me the snappy “Things I’ve Noticed As I’ve Got Older” e-mail, I received another e-mail from another friend. This was a response, or an addendum, to a conversation a group of us had been having in a bar the previous night, about what exactly could be said to constitute “political fiction.” The e-mail was long—perhaps a thousand words—and elegantly written and subtly argued. It was about Mo Yan and Borges, and about the ways in which fiction can be valuably political with or without the intent of a political message on the part of its author. About the first e-mail, it’s worth pointing out that the friend who wrote it is an Internet entrepreneur, a successful salesman. About the second, it’s worth pointing out that it was written by an academic, a writer. I responded to the first e-mail straight away. I still haven’t got around to responding to the second, unless a Gchat apology for not having responded counts as a response. There may be some wider inference to be drawn from this, but we have reached the end of our allotted ten paragraphs, and so that must count as our arbitrary conclusion.
